Metropolis (13 page)

To a casual observer or a tenant overhearing the conversation through the walls, it was uncontroversial: another cousin newly arrived. Liam was waiting for them with a basin of hot water, a razor and a pair of shears, and as soon as he’d loudly welcomed Cousin Frank to New York, he sat him down and undertook to reinvent his coiffure. He cropped the hair atop his head very short. He went to work on the sideburns and made a stiff brush of what had become a ragged moustache. The beard itself he trimmed and brought to a blunt curve at the bottom. Finally, he shaved Harris’s cheeks and lower lip, leaving a healthy fringe of beard to cover his lower jaw. When he was finished, it was hard to recognize Will Williams in the face of Frank Harris. His forehead was freshly exposed, which made his pate seem to rise and his whole head change shape. He was no potato head, no scruffy German stableman, not anymore—he was a respectable Irish workingman, one of hundreds of thousands.

Frank Harris felt supremely self-conscious as he stared into the little hand mirror Beatrice produced from a dresser drawer. Never in his life had he scrutinized himself this hard. He thought about that morning, what he’d done, and he thought about tomorrow: strolling out the front door of the building in daylight for the first time in over a month, going to work beside Liam, laboring honestly to make the street smooth and even. Before long, he thought, with any luck, he might actually be cutting stone, even if it was only Belgian paving blocks. Whatever the Whyos threw at him later, he would figure out a way to deal with it. He wouldn’t let himself do evil at the gang’s behest. He wouldn’t let them own him. He had not crossed over to the other side, not irrevocably, not yet. And anyway, that was all going to happen later. Tomorrow, at least, it would just be him and the world. Tomorrow, at least, was likely to be a good day.

He could feel Beatrice’s eyes on him as he looked into the mirror, and he wondered what she thought of his new face. He looked over and saw her approval. What kind of smile was that, he wondered, a Why Not’s or a woman’s?

She reached out and touched his newly shaven cheek. “Very nice,” she said, and his face, too, broke from its usual impassive mask into a smile. Then Liam started quietly laughing, then Beatrice, finally Harris.

“Well,” said Beatrice. “So
that’s
what Frank Harris looks like.”

13.

SAND, GRAVEL, TAR

S
leeping in the same room as Beatrice had never been so difficult. It didn’t matter how many mattresses away she was; he could still hear her breathing. He could glimpse the jut of her shoulder when she thrashed and turned and lay on her side. Was she awake, too? Harris lay on his mattress, fully alert in the dimness, exquisitely aware of the blood traveling through his veins all night. It wasn’t till she rose around dawn and went into the kitchen with Colleen that he finally drifted off. The church bells were tolling six. When he woke again, everyone was up, and the boys were putting away the mattresses and tugging off his covers.

“Get up, Frank, you slug, aren’t you going to work today?”

Harris was queasy with excitement and exhaustion, anxiety and lust, as he dressed and then took his turn at the washstand that stood before the airshaft window. Harris’s rank was fifth and last among the adults of the household. Family custom permitted each person to add a bit of boiling water to the other’s dregs, and no one got a fresh bowl but Aunt Penelope—it was work to haul water and cost money to heat it. Harris tipped a bit of the old gray water out the window, then splashed in just enough from the kettle to raise a thin steam from the basin. Looking out across the air shaft, he glimpsed a vaguely familiar face in the opposite window. He raised Liam’s soapy shaving brush to his cheek and saw, of course, that the man in the window did likewise. He barely recognized himself, which was good, but would his disguise stand up to the scrutiny of someone who already knew him? How long before chance put him in Luther Undertoe’s way, or that of someone else who remembered his face and his alleged crimes?

He took the strop to Liam’s razor a couple of times and then dipped the blade in the murky basin. He’d soon be able to afford his own shaving kit again, but for now everything was still borrowed, including his name and his face. Harris had always been clean shaven before. It was more difficult to shave around the edges of his new beard than it once had been to strip his whole chin clean. He was careless with the angle of his blade as he navigated the boundaries of his new sideburns, and a thin trickle of red ran along the edge of his cheek. Lacking a styptic, he pressed the cut with wet fingers till it quit oozing. When he came into the kitchen, where the others already sat hunched over their oats, Beatrice looked up and started.

“It’s just a nick,” he said, reaching for his face, realizing it must still be bleeding.

“What? No—it’s just I’m not used to . . .”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” said Colleen, standing up from her chair unexpectedly and knocking it over behind her. “It’s like there’s a stranger
—another
stranger—in the house.”

Harris didn’t quite know what to make of their reaction, and yet it was a good sign. It didn’t hurt that Beatrice was smiling at him so widely again.

“No, just me—Frank Harris.”

All through breakfast, Beatrice was looking at him, but differently. She was examining the man she had made, or remade, to see how good he was. She saw something in his jaw that had been hidden while his full beard grew in: strength. His newly exposed forehead looked wide, honest; the expression in his eyes seemed less obvious, more intelligent. His accent now was perfect. He was perfect. She hadn’t had much hope for this project to succeed, but Harris had proven to be a good student. And now it seemed he was outwardly as well as inwardly malleable. Maybe they
could
pull this off.

If they did, there was a large bonus in it for her, which she thought would be enough, with all the money she’d been saving, to pay for Padric’s passage over. Once he was there, she would devote the extra money she made with the Why Nots to sending Padric to a good Catholic high school. She wouldn’t even let him know about the Whyos and Why Nots, would keep it from him the same as she did with Penelope and Colleen, but for different reasons: She didn’t want him even to consider as an option the life she led. But first she had to make sure that Frank Harris paid off.

“Good luck,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. The cheek was surprisingly warm and smooth.

A short time later, Beatrice’s project trailed out the door after Liam, fortified by oatmeal and black tea and that kiss, feeling close to happy. When he’d first been confined to the O’Gamhnas’ building, it was the last, bitterest part of winter. The ground had been like iron, and the snow and ice of the blizzard only partly scraped away. For weeks and weeks, he’d monitored the melting and then the budding and leafing out of the scraggly trees that reached over the privy-yard wall from the lot next door. He’d felt the weather warming, but that had not prepared him for what he experienced walking out the front door of the tenement. Window watching is a world away from living life. The day was clear and dry and mild. When he stepped onto the packed-earth sidewalk in front of the O’Gamhnas’ building, Frank Harris felt the ground give ever so slightly under his foot. He smelled dirt.

It would have been a joyous morning, if not for the twinge of dread, the specter of his being indoctrinated into the gang through some gruesome murder, the forethought of the noose that would take his weight if his cover failed. How long would the Whyos let him be a paver before they demanded payment in blood? The thought of Beatrice aroused and confused him. In her presence, he was hopeful and happy; away from her, he recalled that she worked for the gang. Now he wondered why he’d even bothered to leave his home country if all he could become in the New World was a manual laborer or a criminal. He could have managed that ambition well enough in the old. But then he saw the street, teeming with people, and smelled the air, sour, sooty and vibrant, and he put dread aside. For now, there was this day, this new job.

It was a fifteen-minute walk to the construction site, and though the territory was familiar, Harris saw the city in a new way. He was gazing not just at the buildings and carriages and people but for the first time at the pavement: It looked ancient and was in awful condition, muddy, rutted and strewn with debris of every sort. Under the copious garbage, most of Manhattan’s streets were not so much paved as pockmarked with knobby, pothole-begetting ostrich-egg cobblestones. Nightmares of mud. They were ankle twisters, hoof and carriage-wheel devourers. This was the kind of road they would be tearing up and replacing with seamless rivers of smooth, flat stones. Looking at the mess, Harris felt excited. There was plenty of work to do. He could hardly believe there were such things as Whyos or Undertoes or gallows in the city at all—everything seemed hopeful and wonderful to him. He felt free.

Harris was, of course, anything but free. There were Whyos everywhere, watching him. They were making sure he didn’t run, blow his cover or otherwise screw up a plan that no Whyo but Johnny knew the details of, except that it required an outsider, a man who was with them in spirit but didn’t know their language, their culture, their enemies or their friends. For the last six weeks, ever since the meeting at Geoghegan’s, every Whyo and Why Not had been aware of Harris as some sort of special agent-in-training. They knew Beanie, not Johnny, was working with him. They had heard that he was what they called
incommunicado,
meaning he couldn’t whyo. They also knew Undertoe still had his net out and was itching to help the cops close the case that the Whyos had foiled when they took Harris in.

The Why Not assigned to watch him that morning was Maggie the Dove, a onetime girlfriend of Dandy Johnny’s. There was a time when people said Johnny was going to make Maggie his First Girl—the Whyo version of the boss’s wife, which would have made her the leader of the Why Nots—but Johnny had thrown her over one day, without any explanation, and since then had never kept exclusively to just one girlfriend. The girls kept on reporting directly to Johnny, and Maggie went back to being just another Why Not, though many of the younger girls still looked up to her. Her cover that morning was pretty standard: She was hawking corn to the road workers as well as the pedestrians on Varick Street. For Maggie, it was a bit of a vacation; her assignment was just to make sure Harris didn’t run off and to keep her eyes peeled for any sign of Undertoe and his lackeys. If anyone troublesome did happen along, she would make a subtle point of distracting them and keep them at the greatest possible distance from Harris. If someone seemed to recognize him, she would raise an alarm. It was his first day, after all, and the masquerade had yet to be tested. Beanie had instructed Harris to speak little or not at all till he got his bearings, despite his rather impressive new brogue. There was the definite possibility that his nerve would fail him when he was put on the spot, and his rolling Irish
r
s would come out in a German growl.

As for Luther Undertoe, that day he had three newsboys drawing a per diem, as usual. They prowled the city for opportunities and information, ran his errands and received a commission when they brought in substantial gains. One of the various tasks they were charged with was keeping a lookout for the man last known as either Geiermeier or Williams. It was obvious to everyone that if he was still in town at all, he would by now be going by a new alias, and so each of them carried a picture of Williams’s face, ripped from one of the illustrateds, wadded up in a pocket. The Jimster was one of them, but neither he nor the others were spending much energy on the Williams case anymore. The trail was stone cold, they all felt, the man long gone to the Western Territories, which wasn’t a half-bad idea, the Jimster decided. That’s what he’d have liked to do, if he could only have figured out how. In the meantime, he was grubbing for Undertoe’s nickels and taking Dandy Johnny’s dimes—mostly for information about Undertoe—and hoping against hope that he’d someday bump into that twenty-dollar bill personified, George the Torch.

There were perhaps two dozen workmen gathered on the corner when Liam and Harris arrived and twice as many by the time work began. Wagons loaded with granite paving stones, sand, gravel and kegs of tar were arranged in such a way that traffic was impeded at either end of a two-block stretch as well as the cross street. The day began with a roll call, and just as Liam had promised, Frank Harris’s name was on the list. There were pavers, chuckers, rammers and laborers. Harris signed on as a laborer, the lowest level, at the rate of $1.25 per day. The first order of business was clearing the old road surface of the copious refuse, and he joined a gang of men wielding shovels and brooms. The warm-weather equivalent of shoveling snow was considerably less pleasant, it turned out. An hour and two cartloads of fetid debris later, they switched to pickaxes and had at the cobbles.

How many feet and hooves and wheels had traversed those backbreaking round stones, and who had laid them down originally and when? Harris could hardly begin to imagine the stories, the lives, but he realized the city was older, far older, than he’d thought. His job was to chop and hack away at the past, and he embraced it, sweating freely, even when his hands began to blister. He had done all he could to jettison his own history, after all. The round, cracked stones that were loosed from the hard dirt by his pickax had seen all manner of things: black men strung up on lantern posts in the Draft Riots, soldiers slouching off to war. They’d looked up the skirt of every lady who trod on them, and they’d tripped innumerable boys. They’d paved the way for life to go on in that corner of the metropolis for a good long time: five generations, a hundred years. They were badly uneven, yes, but still remarkably firmly cemented in by the mud after all that time. Again and again, Harris swung his ax and felt the reverberation to his marrow. Then, just when he felt his bones would break if his pick landed wrong again, he was switched to the gang that was hauling off the rubble, which was even harder work. It was remarkable how many cobblestones it had taken to pave that street, how fast the five-pound stones added up to tons. Replacing the cobbles would be square granite stones, Belgian blocks, and once they were laid you’d be able to roll a marble straight from Dominick to Broome or even Watts, if your aim was true. It wasn’t a cathedral, no, but Harris felt all right about the job. It was progress. It was something worth building, he thought. It also kept his mind off Beatrice.

They had a contract on a ten-block area and just a month to complete the job, which meant the work went on at a furious pace. Behind the common laborers came the graders, to establish the correct pitch of the road. They raked, scraped, filled and raked again, contouring the street so it arced slightly toward the curbs. Their foreman brought out his level, took readings, demanded a correction or two and finally gave the work his nod. Whenever Harris turned back to look at the newly graded terrain behind him, he found himself amazed. It looked like a plowed field, ready for seed, but on the contrary: The streets they worked on would be covered with stone in such a way that nothing would grow there ever again. But first the properly contoured subgrade had to be compacted with the ten-ton roller.

“What’s your name?” one of the graders asked him, and he was flattered at first. Someone wanted to know him.

“Frank Harris,” he said, just right, just Irish enough.

Then he learned how his name would be used: “All right then, Harris—I need twenty bags of sand on the double, before that roller gets here!” It seemed to him that after that first command, it never let up; someone was always shouting,
Harris, over here! Rake! Hammer! Chisel! Blocks! Coal! Sand! Hurry up, I ain’t got all day. And do it
before
you eat your dinner, man. Get a move on, hustle!
He never stopped to think all day. On the second and third days, however, he began to find spare shreds of time to observe the job that was being done.

Once the underlying surface was finished, it was time for the base layer of mortar. Without it, whatever stones the pavers laid would hardly last a season of rain. Lime, clean sand and water were turned in a drum and churned to cement. Harris’s arm grew sore with the constant turning of the crank handle. When the cement had cured, six inches of baked sand were strewn evenly over the concrete foundation. One of Harris’s tasks was to heat the sand till it was bone-dry. Only then did the pavers begin the laying of the stone. His next job was to deliver enough blocks to keep the work flowing smoothly.